We've seen a lot of these rigs since Intel and YOYOtech went all Norris McWhirter on us with their combined Fi7epower MLK 1610 efforts for the launch of the Core i7. That was the fastest machine available in 2008 and a year and a half later we've the Hydro Nemesis from Cryo PC that makes it look like Babbage's difference engine.

In between, YOYOtech has tried its hand again with the Fi7epower refresh: the MLK3, and that's a rig that's gotten pretty damned close to the speed of this machine.

The Hydro Nemesis has got something beating in its silicon heart that makes it a much speedier beast: Intel's brand new Core i7 980X Extreme processor. Yup, the £800, six-core processor has found a home in Cryo PC's liquid-cooled gaming behemoth.

Along with the twin HD 5870 graphics cards that makes this the fastest gaming PC available today.

Thread-heavy

The Core i7 980X holds six cores, and in Intel's HyperThreaded world that makes for a mammoth twelve threads of processing performance in this powerhouse of a chip. The is the second of its chips to be based on the new, teeny tiny 32nm production process. It's definitely a case of more in less space.

The chip itself is smaller than a Lynnfield core, 240mm2 compared to 296mm2, but manages to cram in those extra two cores at the same clockspeed as the Core i7 975, and with the same 130W TDP. You also get a rather astonishing 12MB of shared cache memory. It's one tidy little package then.

When you're talking about multi-threaded computational work you're not going to find a faster commercial CPU on the planet - at least you won't outside of Intel's own testing labs.

Cryo PC, doesn't think that's quite good enough and has gone to great lengths to install a full watercooling loop to take care of this monster CPU and give it a fairly hefty factory overclock. It's also crossed the 4GHz threshold, clocking the i7 980X at a lightening 4.2GHz, almost managing to up the clockspeeds by a full 1GHz.

This is mainly thanks to the Asus Republic of Gamers motherboard forming the basis of the Hydro Nemesis. It's the Rampage II Extreme X58 super board in this spin, but later revisions will use the brand new Rampage III Extreme. As you'll see from our review, that's a board that will happily top the 1GHz overclock on air-cooling alone. That may up the cost of the Hydro Nemesis by another £100 or so, but the addition of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 might just make that an edition worth having.

Unfortunately, despite being included in the watercooling loop, the graphics cards themselves haven't actually had any tweaking done to them at all. It's possible though that having the extra heat generated by the dual-GPU setup leaching into the coolant may just upset the CPU itself.

Separate cooling loops for the CPU and twin GPUs would have negated any such issues, but if you wanted to do that you'd probably need to get Tom Portsmouth on the case for that…

CrossFire grown up

That said though the dual HD 5870s do an incredible job of churning through any benchmark you care to throw at them. This was ably demonstrated by YOYOtech's latest Fi7epower rig, but with the Gulftown CPU backing them up this pair of cards is, in fact, slightly faster in this configuration.

It's also worth noting how CrossFire has come on in recent times. Following AMD's decision to have its top-end graphics card specifically a multi-GPU device, it had to rework its CrossFire drivers to bring some more real-world benefit to having that extra GPU crunching away. Previously, you were looking at between an extra 40 to 60 per cent boost when a second card was added, with a law of diminishing returns governing each extra card you added in CrossFireX configurations.

The situation is very different now. We tested the Hydro Nemesis with CrossFire disabled to see how much difference we got out of the second GPU and the results that came back almost doubled the performance.

Taking the DX10-based Far Cry 2 as an example, at 2,560 x 1,600 it was showing an average 47fps on a single HD 5870, with both enabled in CrossFire that leapt up dramatically to 86fps. That's a boost of 83 per cent. On DiRT2 that went up again to 93 per cent with scores of 45fps rising to 87fps with two cards. This has long been the goal for both SLI and CrossFire; AMD's configuration has now definitely proved its worth, next month we'll find out how Nvdia's latest Fermi cards stack up in its own multi-GPU setups.

Liquid performer

So how does the Hydro Nemesis stand up against the other lightning-fast rigs we've featured in the hallowed pages of PC Format over the last few months then?